Performing Artists and the Financial Fallout of the Coronavirus

New York’s cultural scene has taken hits before—after 9/11, during the recession that began in 2007, after Hurricane Sandy—but its elimination for an indefinite period of time is unprecedented.Photograph by Christopher Anderson / Magnum

On Thursday, March 12th, the morning after the N.B.A. suspended its season and Donald Trumpbanned travel from Europe, the actor Emily Cass McDonnell was in rehearsals for an upcoming production of Annie Baker’s play “The Antipodes.” In the play, a group of people sit around a table brainstorming for a project, the exact nature of which is never fully defined. In the last scene, as an apocalyptic storm brews outside, the group’s leader arrives and calls the whole thing off. That Thursday, the finale took on an oracular significance when, weeks into rehearsal, McDonnell and the rest of the cast learned that, due to safety measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus, their show was being cancelled.

McDonnell did not question what needed to be done, but did wonder whether the shutdowns would last. At first, members of the cast discussed whether they might perform the show with lower audience capacity, or live-stream it. They considered reading the script through one last time, but some of the actors felt that it would be too painful, and others had to make arrangements to get back home. A member of the creative team begged the producers to wait to destroy the set, just in case. “I think some people really believed it would be two weeks,” she told me, when we spoke on the phone a few days later. By the next morning, it was clear that even a gathering of the cast would be irresponsible.

New York’s performing-arts scene has taken hits before—after 9/11, during the recession that began in 2007, after Hurricane Sandy—but its elimination for an indefinite period of time is unprecedented. On March 11th and 12th, Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, forbade all gatherings of more than five hundred people, and Broadway and Off Broadway theatres were shut down. The cancellation of theatrical runs, musical tours, comedy shows, club nights, film screenings, book launches, and political fund-raisers quickly followed. The night of Monday, March 16th, when bars and restaurants were officially closed, the calendar had been wiped clean. I have seen small clusters of friends lose their jobs in the past, but last week, when dozens of friends and acquaintances saw their livelihoods evaporate in a matter of twenty-four hours, was different. Requests appeared online: if you could afford to eat the cost of your ticket, consider it a donation to the theatre. If you couldn’t go see the musician live, buy her album on Bandcamp. Night clubs started Venmo accounts for their bartenders and bouncers. Independent bookstores, where readings had been cancelled, offered discounted shipping to people who bought new releases. The world seemed to bifurcate into people who still had jobs (for now) and those who didn’t, with the former anxiously looking for ways to cover for the latter, who were now scrambling for new sources of income, any income. On my social-media feeds, one musician I know offered virtual cello lessons; another offered virtual reiki consultations. People who produce sound events advertised their services mastering music. People put their musical equipment up for sale. As in most cities, the arts scene in New York is inextricably linked to the service and event-production industries, and the loss of creative livelihoods has been compounded by the closures of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, and the cancellations of weddings, conferences, and other large events. Day jobs and night jobs disappeared at the same time.

I spoke with McDonnell on Tuesday, the day that she had been scheduled to fly from New York, where the production had held its rehearsals, to Los Angeles, where its opening night would have been held, at the Mark Taper Forum, on April 1st. She had just learned that she and the rest of the cast would be paid for exactly one more week. She had spent the morning on the phone, trying to negotiate a less punitive severance. She had called the state about unemployment benefits, and had spent almost an hour on hold with the New York Department of Labor, who told her to call back on April 4th, when she would qualify. She wondered whether, on April 4th, there would still be a Department of Labor to call—the person she spoke with, who was still working from an office, told her that he couldn’t work remotely because he didn’t own a computer.

Her concerns were not only material but existential. Like many of us, McDonnell had spent the weekend coming to understand that the night life and culture that many of us are missing will not simply reconstitute itself the moment we can all hang out together again. Venues will close. Young people who came to New York to pursue creative careers and can no longer pay their rents will return to the cities they came from. McDonnell, who lives alone, felt isolated and worried. Online chatter about watching television and cooking beans was not helping. “I can’t concentrate,” she told me on the phone, last Tuesday. “I haven’t settled into watching shows and reading my books and catching up on things. I know that everyone’s in shock and trying to make the best of it and deal with it but the whole notion of a staycation feels super offensive to me.”

After the barrage of closures of last week, many of the performers I spoke with were still in this process of adjustment. For an office worker, the question of how to exercise can be answered with a yoga video in the living room; for a dancer, maintaining physical conditioning without space to move can be more difficult. (Alicia Graf Mack, the director of dance at the Juilliard School, broadcast a barre class online from an empty studio: “We don’t have music today,” she says. “I’ll talk you through.”) Writers, who at least can console themselves with the fact that a book is a material object that exists independent of groups of people, are lamenting the rare chance that a book launch offers to emerge from solitude and interact with an audience. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, whose second novel, “Hex,” will be published at the end of the month, told me, “The failure to celebrate becomes this weird transcendent problem with respect to work that has taken years.” Dinerstein Knight had events planned in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all of which have been cancelled. “Aside from the couple hundred of book sales that we would have brought in at those larger events, the word of mouth and the community building and the sort of long extension of those events in those geographies is unquantifiable.”

Plays that were going before an audience for the first time might never get their chance. Daniel Goldstein co-wrote the musical “Unknown Soldier” with the late Michael Friedman. Its run at Playwrights Horizons was cancelled the week of its première. “My colleagues and producers will never get to see it,” he said. “The actors are sad because they had a show that they loved and believed in, and for a lot of them it was going to be their New York débuts.” But the most pressing needs were economic. “All theatre people, except the ones who have institutional jobs—we’re gig people,” Goldstein, whose day job, as an associate director on the Broadway show “Come From Away” is also now gone, said. “We’re no different than a handyman. When the theatres closed we were literally all unemployed. Everyone I know is unemployed.”

The economic fallout of the virus has made the disparity between employed workers and independent contractors clearer than ever. New York has a paid-sick-leave law, but it does not cover contract workers. Many freelance workers in the arts have high self-employment taxes and health-insurance costs; they do not have 401(k) matching programs or employer-backed disability insurance, or severance when work is called off. If artists have health insurance through a guild or a union, coverage is usually dependent on working for a certain number of weeks every year. “Think about losing your health coverage in the midst of a pandemic,” Len Egert, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, a union that represents workers in the fields of opera, choral music, and dance, said. The union has more than sixty collective-bargaining agreements. Egert told me the response has varied by company. “Some companies are stepping up and doing great—Sarasota Ballet is paying dancers through their contracted season,” he told me. “Other companies are cancelling a performance and not paying anything.”

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Dance/NYC has been conducting a survey of the dance industry since the closures began. Alejandra Duque Cifuentes, its executive director, told me that, among the fifty-four responses the organization had received by Sunday, the average self-reported annual income was less than thirty-five thousand dollars a year, which in New York City is just above the poverty line. Ann Marie Lonsdale, an arts-administration consultant, was involved in the creation of a Web site called COVID-19 Freelance Artist Resources, a roundup of information about emergency funds, online platforms, and remote-job listings that, according to its creators and moderators, received almost a hundred and sixty thousand page views in its first forty-eight hours of existence. “These are choices that artists have to make with eyes wide open when they go into a career in the arts,” Lonsdale told me. “But we’re thinking about a sector of workers who are undersaved in general, who are underemployed in general, who have massive student-loan debt in general, and who do not have retirement savings, generally speaking.” She went on, “In the largest sense, in a field-wide sense, the sector is not able to take care of its workers. We’re talking about freelance artists who are trying to extract payments from under-resourced arts organizations who are also in crisis.”

Ijeoma Oluo, who lives in Seattle, is the best-selling author of the book “So You Want to Talk About Race.” Until a few days ago, she had a full schedule of lectures for the spring. By last Thursday, March 12th, everything she had booked for the next two months had been cancelled. Oluo had some savings, but many of her friends did not. Within a few days, Oluo, who had organized a few small community fund-raisers in the past, set up the Seattle Artists Relief Fund Amid COVID-19. By the end of last week, the fund had raised more than a hundred thousand dollars, and Oluo had received more than two hundred applications for financial assistance. The first people she heard from were musicians and d.j.s, as conferences, weddings, festivals, and club nights were cancelled. Then came the teaching artists, as art classes and dance classes were cancelled. Now, she said, “it’s pretty much anyone whose work depends on them being in front of an audience: well-respected artists, young artists, artists in every form.” Soon, as the waves of cancellations crashed around the country, she began receiving requests for advice from people in other cities hoping to set up similar fund-raisers.

“This is really bringing to light the need for 1099 and freelance employees to have the benefits similar to part-time and full-time employees,” Shawn Escarciga, a performance artist who helped launch a GoFundMe page soliciting donations for low-income artists in New York that was modelled on the one Oluo had started in Seattle, said. Escarciga and a co-organizer, Nadia Schwartz Tykulsker, who is an arts administrator and advocate, launched the Web site on Wednesday, March 11th. By the following Sunday, it had received almost twenty thousand dollars in donations, and five hundred applications for aid—enough that any further requests were put on hold while the site’s administrators evaluated the requests. The applicants, Escarciga said, included musicians who have had gigs cancelled, freelance art models, art handlers whose galleries are closing, and night-life artists. The applications have included requests for help buying groceries and medications, and, for the vast majority, paying rent.

In Austin, in the aftermath of the cancellation of South by Southwest, three locals, Mary Kathryn Paynter, the owner of a brand-marketing consultancy, Shelly Lashley, an event manager, and her brother Luke Lashley, a video producer, made a Web site, I Lost My Gig, where workers of all kinds whose jobs at SXSW had been cancelled submitted brief descriptions of their situations and lost wages. By March 10th, the site had more than four hundred submissions, which summarized more than two million dollars in lost income. The list of people included d.j.s, dancers, production techs, musicians, photographers, and at least one spoken-word poet. Most contributors to the site had included their online payment handles, in case people wanted to make donations, but Paynter, one of the three creators, told me the site was as much an “expression of empathy” as a material fix.

“The economy of Austin has two tiers in it,” she said, going on to describe a very wealthy but transient population of professional workers and a tier of gig-economy locals, many of whom are heavily dependent on South by Southwest in the spring and the music festival Austin City Limits in the fall. As Austin has become more affluent in recent years, she said, entry-level salaries have not gone up in tandem with rents. The Texas state government rejected the Medicaid expansion option of the Affordable Care Act, and marketplace health insurance for freelancers can cost about six hundred and fifty dollars a month for an individual with no dependents, as is the case for Paynter. “When the city tried to pass paid sick leave two years ago, there was a huge dustup from local businesses,” Paynter said. “We are a progressive city on the face of it but every time we try to take progressive steps this other class steps in and stops it from happening.”

There is a particular kind of disapproval reserved for artists and those whose chosen careers, however fulfilling they may be, only very rarely result in material prosperity. Under a certain American logic, if you are lucky enough not to be structurally impoverished—if you have the privilege of choosing a career—then pursuing a living that falls outside the social safety net, in a job you might actually like, is a play-at-your-own risk endeavor. In lean times, the government might bail out the auto, airline, and banking industries, but it generally leaves the arts to survive a drop in philanthropic giving on their own (especially on a federal level: the budget of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is larger than that of the National Endowment for the Arts). “In this moment, people shame me, they shame artists, like, ‘Why don’t you have six months of savings?’ ‘Why don’t you have three months of savings?’ ‘It’s basically your fault that you’re at this precipice,’ ” Nicole Brewer, a Washington-based consultant who runs trainings that teach anti-racist theatre practices, said. Her March schedule had included paid appearances at conferences and a workshop at the Yale School of Drama, and it was she who posted a call for resources on Facebook asking for information about funding, moving work online, and taking care of the most vulnerable artists, which led to the creation of the COVID-19 Freelance Artist Resources Web site.

McDonnell told me that as governments floundered in their responses and proposed fixes that, with the exception of direct cash payments, do little to directly address the vulnerabilities of independent contractors, she had gone from thinking, “they’ll do something,” to wondering “who’s the ‘they’?” Her own safety and security was one thing, but it was clear that the COVID-19 measures were exposing the fault lines of our economy. Mostly in solitude, she has pondered the choices she has made. “Coming together in a group to reflect on the world, in ritual, is a worthy way to live,” she said. “It’s a worthy thing to devote your life to.” I noticed that, as she spoke of acting, she had already slipped into the past tense. “It was a sacrifice, but it was worth it,” she said. “It was what I loved to do.”

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